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Saudi Investor Suggested Brooks Had to Go

By Robert Mackey July 15, 2011 10:40 amJuly 15, 2011 10:40 am

As my colleagues Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell report, Rebekah Brooks, the embattled chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper operations, announced her resignation on Friday, after weeks of pressure.

Perhaps the only piece of good news for Mr. Murdoch is that the relentless coverage of his company’s woes lessened slightly in Britain on Friday because BBC News journalists began a one-day strike at midnight on Thursday.

Unfortunately for Ms. Brooks, though, the strike did not begin soon enough to prevent the broadcast of a BBC “Newsnight” interview with a billionaire Saudi prince, Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who is the News Corporation’s second-largest investor, late Thursday.

Sitting on his yacht in Cannes, the prince, who owns 7 percent of the global media empire — a share second only to Rupert Murdoch’s 12 percent — told the BBC that if there were any indication that Ms. Brooks knew about the misconduct by journalists at The News of the World, “For sure she has to go, you bet she has to go.” He added: “Ethics to me are very important. I will not deal with a lady or a man that has any sliver of doubt on her or his integrity.”

Less than 12 hours after that interview was broadcast, Ms. Brooks resigned.

According to a report from The Telegraph, Ms. Brooks’s resignation was also preceded by much more frankly stated criticism from Mr. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, who is a television executive.

This video report from Britain’s Sky News — which is partly owned by the News Corporation, but is bound by law to produce fair and balanced reports — gives an overview of Ms. Brooks’s career and includes remarks made in her defense last week by James Murdoch, who oversees the British newspaper division of the News Corporation.

Roy Greenslade, a former editor of The Daily Mirror who blogs about the media for The Guardian, wrote after Ms. Brooks resigned on Friday:

It was the right decision but it came far too late. Rupert Murdoch should have requested her resignation on the day that he discovered she was editor of the News of the World when Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked. That revelation was so shocking in and by itself to have warranted her red head on a platter.

The subsequent reports about the likely hacking of the relatives of other murder victims, 7/7 bombing casualties and of soldiers should have left Murdoch in no doubt about the need to fire his News International chief executive.

Instead, he placed her in initial charge of the investigation into the very matters for which she had, by virtue of her editorship, been responsible for. It was a truly calamitous decision, making him and his hapless son, James, look decidedly foolish and weak-willed.

Last week, in a Guardian podcast on the scandal, Mr. Greenslade described Ms. Brooks as “just a human shield for James Murdoch,” and implied that she had stayed on to deflect criticism from the son of the News Corporation’s chairman.

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